How often have you sat through employee training workshops only to emerge disappointed and confused? "Being keenly interested in personal development, I sat through many such workshops on soft skills and cognitive skills, which were held by corporates," says 30-year-old Swapnil Kamat, adding, "I found these to be boring, and frankly, the takeaways rarely applied to work lives." He figured there had to be a better way of conducting such programmes. His company, Work Better—Training & Development, is an attempt to do just that.

Set up in October 2008, the executive training company focuses on teaching behavioural and cognitive skills to corporate employees. The co-founders, Kamat and his wife Ruchira Karnik, had research reports to prove they were on to a good thing.

In 2007, a study by Stanford Research Institute and Carnegie Mellon Foundation, on Fortune 500 CEOs, claimed that 75% of successful long-term jobs depended on people skills, not technical ones. So they drummed up a seed capital of Rs 2.5 lakh from their personal savings and set up shop at Kandivali, Mumbai.

This wasn't their first attempt at entrepreneurship. At 16, Kamat had cut his teeth while working for his father's company, Wipro Infotech Channel Partners-CCR. Then, in college, he founded an events company, ENT Unlimited, which organised college and youth-based events.

After graduating from Goa University in 2002, he got an MBA degree from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management. This was followed by a stint at L'Oreal as a brand manager, and then Kamat joined forces with Karnik to launch a travel portal, Trip2Goa.com. Karnik had quit her job as sales manager for Elle magazine for this venture.

Launched in September 2006 with a seed capital of Rs 5 lakh, again drawn from their savings, Trip2Goa did brisk business and achieved a sizeable scale just one year into operations.

When he organised a company retreat for Bank of America, and saw first-hand the workshops being conducted, he had his eureka moment. So, a few months later, along with three employees, he went ahead and registered Work Better, while Trip2Goa was sold off in October 2011.

The husband-wife duo faced a tough one-and-a-half years due to the novelty of their business idea and lack of experience in the field. The venture grew one customer at a time but, luckily, they managed to break even in nine months, earning Rs 5.5 lakh.

In the course of the past four years, the couple has conducted programmes for over 40,000 executives in India through 30 certified contract-based trainers. The 10-employee company's turnover in 2011-12 was Rs 4 crore and the current client list includes Sony India, Trident Hotels, Tata Communications, HDFC Bank, Hindustan Petroleum and Philips.

The founders are now looking at adding new courses and revamping their curriculum. Also on the cards are some interactive and story-based video training programmes. They hope to become a Rs 20-25 crore company in the next five years.